Tips for a More Effective Hiring Process

Most managers agree that hiring is one of the most important aspects of their job. It also tends to be one of their least favorite responsibilities. Ask any manager what their strategy for hiring is, and most will just shrug and tell you they really don’t have one. This is because the hiring process is an exhausting one. There is paperwork to be filled out, rules to adhere to and even time constraints to consider.

In order for your business’s hiring process to be more effective, you need to streamline it. It needs to be broken down to its essential steps so that hiring is quick and easy for everyone involved, from the manager down to the new employee. Here are seven tips for accomplishing that from your friends at Dale Carnegie Training of North Dakota:

1. Put An End To Long Delays — Just as you are considering more than one candidate, they are considering more than one potential employer. Like many other aspects of business, recruitment is competitive. That means there is no time for passing paperwork throughout an organization before taking any real action. Top talent won’t stay available for long, so managers need to address the hiring process sooner versus later.

2. Don’t Rummage Through Résumés — Sifting through stacks of résumés from unqualified applicants is a waste of time and energy. Make sure that your recruiters understand the job requirements thoroughly so that every applicant they forward to you meets the minimum requirements. This expedites the hiring process right from the start.

3. Improve Your Interviewing — Good interviewing is a lot like good conversation. Both require a balance of push and pull, and, in the case of interviews, both formal and casual conversations are appropriate. Also, keep in mind that candidates who make good interviewees do not necessarily make good employees. We suggest crafting interviews to be multifaceted, so you get to know the employee as a person as well as a worker.

4. Come To An Interview Prepared — Managers should never go into an interview blind, especially when dealing with top talent. Smart candidates will come equipped with both market research and competitive benchmarking, hoping it gives them an edge, so managers should conduct their own research in order to go toe-to-toe with candidates.

5. Minimize Documentation — Part of what jams up the hiring process is excessive paperwork. Sure, certain legalities need to be recorded, but a lot of this paperwork is just useless and never looked at again. So why bother having it? Slimming down employment paperwork so that it is less of a hassle for managers means less of a hassle for everyone.

6. Observe What Does And Doesn’t Work — In larger businesses, several managers may have hiring responsibilities. When this is the case, these managers need to be in communication with one another. They ought to swap hiring success stories in order to put together a more effective hiring strategy based on experience, instead of just theory.

7. Give Managers More Control — Many managers feel disconnected from HR, which can sometimes cause them to lose a top candidate. They claim that the offers approved by HR just aren’t competitive enough. At the end of the day, hiring a new employee should be about strengthening your team, not saving as much money as possible. Hiring based on dollars and cents is never wise, so give managers better salary survey data, and afford them more control over how high their offers can be.

Ultimately, hiring rests on more than just a manager’s shoulders. Managers, HR and recruiters need to work as a team to make the hiring process fluid and more likely to bring a new, ideal hire into the fold. This requires the process to be streamlined – disassembled then reassembled so that all the fat has been trimmed off and the hiring process has been made quick, easy and painless.

This post is brought to you by the good folks at Dale Carnegie Training of North Dakota, providers of professional development and management development courses and information in North Dakota. We would love to connect with you on Facebook.